HeadNun

Has anyone else noticed the rat population in Peckham park has exploded? I used to spot one a week, now I'm seeing three in ten minutes.

Ignore most advice and go with your gut. I left my pup to cry overnight until he was in an utter state and it was the wrong decision. Best thing to do for the first two nights is sleep on the floor next to their crate to comfort them. It was 18 months before I could happily leave him alone - did all the training and it didn't work. Might be different for you though. You can try as hard as you like with the potty training but they have no bowel or bladder control when brand new, so be patient and expect accidents. Instinctively they want to go outside, they just haven't figured out how to hold on yet. Some love crates, others hate them. Mine hated his for ages and now takes himself off there all the time. And yes, it is a cage. I invite him to sleep on my bed and he chooses the cage every time. Every dog is different - a dog training expert told me my nervous dog was untrainable and offered me a refund. I knew this was rubbish. He's over two now and a happy little camper who understands most of what I'm saying (but chooses to do what he bloody-well wants).

Yes that's what happened - a BBC breaking news alert on my phone. Turns out there was a Met misconduct hearing after he was charged and confessed, in which they decided to sack him. It was all over the news that day. Seemed strange to to report it as breaking news when there surely could not have been any other conceivable outcome. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-64302608

Has anyone done one in the local area? I don't want to spend months on end wasting an hour stuck in traffic, only to have to turn back as soon as I get to the test site. So I'm thinking about doing one of these 'pass or die' courses and just getting it out of the way. Has anyone ever done one of these and has success?

I don't think the OP has said he / she is going to contact the RSPCA, just hope the owners of the dog that was kicked will read this.

I couldn't believe it today when I got a BBC breaking news alert announcing that he'd been sacked... it felt like a joke.

I know her too - she's come up to me on several occasions with her card, hustling for business. I never liked the vibe I got from her and didn't actually believe she was a dog walker.

It appears that Ngozi Fulani isn't her real name. I did think Fulani was an odd surname, and that it was odd to have a name like that if your origins are the West Indies. It's Marlene Headley, I think. And she's aired views before that the royal family is racist and subjected Harry and Meghan to domestic violence. It looks as if, even though Susan Hussey was probably pretty tactless, she was walking straight into a trap. If Headley had a non British name and was wearing a costume that looked to be from another country, it's fair to assume she might be proudly representing another country and want to talk about said other country. Who knows... I mean if I turned up in the EDT in full in C17th Huguenot dress and called myself Marie La Touche, it might be reasonable for people to be curious.

That was genuine baiting. The intent was very clearly there.

I ask people where they're from all the time, if I can tell they weren't born here. It invariably leads to interesting conversations, during which I usually learn a lot and we often find some common ground. I've found that people enjoy talking about their home countries and culture, no one has ever been offended. I was raised in Africa for some of my life, have worked all over the world and, even though I'm white (Scots Irish), I have a Nigerian name, which causes no small amount of hilarity whenever I meet someone Nigerian and it's always a great conversation starter. In my experience, white racists tend not to be well travelled and tend not to be interested in finding out about people's backgrounds and culture. In the case of BP, I cannot be sure that that tweet is a word-for-word transcript of the exchange. Ngozi Fulani was wearing what looked to be some sort of African dress and has a west African name, which may have lead SH to think she wasn't from the UK. Once she'd heard Hackney, it might have been prudent to leave it there, but it's possible, she was trying to A) start a conversation and find out more about Ngozi and B) try to get some details so she could brief the palace about her, ahead of introducing Ngozi to someone else. I also gather there were people from all over the world there. Perhaps she pushed it too hard but, in the all the years she's been of service to a very much non-racist queen, I find it hard to believe that she purposefully and maliciously went out of her way to make Ngozi feel uncomfortable. Context is everything and sometimes the way something is felt isn't the way it was intended.

Yip. Sums the ridiculousness of it all up perfectly.

I said we're becoming a more class-less society, and I stand by that. Historically, wealth had little to do with social class. You could be upper class yet poor, and if you were working or lower middle class and had made money, you'd be looked down upon by higher classes and described disparagingly as 'nouveau riche'. Petit bourgeois was a similar insult which, as Jenijen rightly said, was more about the attitude of a certain socially aspirational lower middle class. The Macmillan dictionary definition is not quite how it's used. That's what I mean when I talk about class, and thankfully a lot of that snobbery is disappearing. That's not to say other social divides aren't forming, and that the rich-poor gap isn't widening, and that it isn't totally shit, but they're two totally separate things.

Yep, swiped at me just last night. She's a wee minx. My dog is petrified of her.

I see the 500 degrees pizza place is being replaced by....... a pizza place

TBH, comrade, I'm not convinced of the accuracy of your definition of "bourgeois", either in a Marxist/Marxian sense or the vernacular sense, which both correctly describe Soderberg. But you obviously have strong feelings about it, so feel to imagine Soderberg described as "yet another coffee shop/bakery for the bourgeoisie", which I hope you find dogmatically acceptable. https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/bourgeois_1 If Dulwich becomes plagued by as many Kulak-oriented shops (perhaps they would sell petrol cultivators, or yokes for oxen) as we have smug identikit coffee shops, I will come back to moan about the preponderance of kulak-oriented shops. Until then... I have to agree with Penguin here - 'bourgeois' might describe the patrons, but I don't see how a bakery can be bourgeois. Anyway, this word surely no longer describes anyone these days, it's a pejorative way to describe social climbers in the past who belonged to the lower middle classes. Surely these days we're a far more class-less society. These places might be predictable, perhaps, with a large dollop of twee, but not bourgeois.

Have a listen / watch to this too. https://drchatterjee.com/how-to-heal-chronic-pain-with-dr-howard-schubiner/

Hey Jody, Do you know if there is any actual medical treatment for Long Covid? So little is known about it, other than a very large list of (often quite vague) symptoms. I'm not sure what can be done medically for post viral complications / fatigue, other than waiting for it to pass. Have you considered contacting a group like https://www.sirpa.org/about? They are a group of medical & healthcare professionals who are having great success helping patients with chronic pain, ME and Fybromylgia etc. Also, try the Curable app - some clued up GPs will write you a prescription, so you can use it for free for six weeks. Try reading anything by Howard Schubiner or John Sarno. Some people have been 'cured' just by reading Sarno's book, though it of course depends on what your symptoms are. I have a GP friend who is making great strides helping patients with Long Covid symptoms and the other illnesses listed above, without the use of drugs. You can always message me if you'd like to know more

Gail's is opening on Zenoria Street, right around the corner from the Nordic bakery.

It appears that socially constructed stereotypes are the new way to define women and men. So if a man wears a dress, paints his nails and calls himself Delilah, then he's a woman. If a woman cuts her hair short, dons some DMs and braces, then she's a man. Neither needs to take hormones to be considered to have changed 'gender', they just need to 'live' as they 'feel'.

This issue spans the political spectrum. Most radical fems who are gender critical tend to be politically left-wing. But many right-wingers are against this new religion. It's possibly the only issue which both sides are united upon.

You need to leave the confines of your basement & take a step into reality you absolute degenerate. Wow! All because I see people for who they are and not their private parts. First it's racism, then homophobia and now in 2020s Britain transphobia has replaced homophobia as the socially acceptable form of hate. No. This is the 2020's equivalent of the sexual abuse scandal in the catholic church / children's homes. Only difference will be that it wasn't covered up, it was actively encouraged by people who'd drunk the kool aid. And what's the collateral damage? Thousands of young people with double mastectomies, atrophied vaginas and wombs, infertility, changed voices, hair where they no longer want it... all without informed consent. My father's a paediatrician (dealt with numerous intersex cases throughout his career), who started to get scared back in 2014. All letters to the Tavi, stonewalled, my brother's a doc, he's bewildered, same with my uncle, my cousin, all of them scientists and saying "the emperor is fucking naked", but you flat-earthers have no time for science. You know better.

I don’t know what sex you are but I’m telling you that I don’t know a single woman who wants a biological male in their private spaces or sports categories. Not a single female. None. And none of them is homophobic, in fact some of them are lesbians. If you’re female then you’re an anomaly, if you’re male then you’re an entitled misogynist and the main crux of this heinous problem. And if you only see people “for who they are and not their private parts” then why do you support people changing their pronouns, identifying with stereotypical tropes of what male and female is, and potentially mutilating themselves beyond all repair? Surely the people who are against all this new religion (“transphobes”) are the ones who truly care about who people are and not what’s in their pants? Go figure

I support the rights of trans people, but I am against male-bodied people being allowed into women's changing rooms, toilets, prison wings and rape centres. I am against male-bodied people competing against women in sport. I am also against self-ID, where a man being able to say he identifies as a woman and throwing on a dress permits him to then walk into any female spaces he so pleases without scrutiny. And I am against young children being told that the way out of their genuienly distressing gender dysphoria is to wear a breast binder and go on puberty blockers, without a SHIT TON of therapy first to find out the root of their dysphoria (which is often because they are gay and often autistic). People who shout 'transphobe' at the first available opportunity tend to be the ones who cover their ears and shout 'la la la la I'm not listening', instead of engaging with this nuanced discussion in an adult way. Luckily insidious orgs like Mermaids, who were grooming kids online, have finally had a light shone on their dubious behaviour. Anyway, if anyone else is worried about their kids and / or their own access to what should be female-only spaces and wants to to form some sort of discussion group, you can DM me.

Utterly bizarre. What a shower of idiots

If you think Rowling and Duffield are transphobic then you’ve just jumped on a bandwagon without doing your homework or interrogating the facts